Maintaining organization is crucial! Your to-go kits or your laptop bag are only useful if you know how to (and actually do) maintain them. Here are some simple ideas to make sure your car or mobile workspace stay nice and tidy!
Digital Nomads
Purge your backpack: If you’re a hot-desker or use a coworking space, it’s best to pack light. But over time, paperwork, notes, and sticky notes can add up to a lot of clutter. I recommend that you purge your backpack, satchel, or laptop bag on a regular basis. If you let it go too long, purging might seem like a big task, but having a regular schedule keeps the task very manageable. Whether it’s once weekly or twice a month, keep track of when you purge your mobile workspace so you know when it’s time to get it all out and see what needs to go.
Have a home for everything: Decide where each item goes in your bag, and stick to it. If you keep your pens in the front pocket, make sure you put them back there when you’re done with them. Having a home for each item means that when it’s time to do a purge, you know where to put everything back. It’s much easier to find things when you need them, too!
Vehicles
Just like your car’s fuel gauge or your printer’s ink levels show you how close you are to empty, use a visual cue to
Clean up: Treat your car like any other area of your home or office, and clean up when you’re done. If you grab a meal on the go, make sure all wrappers leave the car when you arrive at your next destination. Or, have a trash bin in your car, and empty it regularly. No more stray straw wrappers under the seats!
Purge your car: Just like you would your work bag, take everything out, declutter, and put things back in their homes. To declutter:
- Remove all belongings from the car
- Sort items into categories: trash, recycle, keep, donate, or things that need to go back into the house.
- Put the “keep” items back into the car where they go.
Maintaining organization in a space is simple if you keep on top of it.
Regularly purging and tidying are great habits to get into, because they turn cleaning up the car from a frustrating weekend project into tiny tasks that you do as you go.
I agree! I particularly love that you mentioned car organization. People forget about keeping their cars organized, resulting in lost items while on the go. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve known many people with neat houses and messy cars! It’s a spot that you’re never in unless you’re using it, and while you’re driving it you can’t (or certainly shouldn’t) throw the trash out!
Oh my goodness – the car! I had a friend once when our kids were little who used to say, “Every month, I empty it out and get it fumigated.” LOL! Stuff just seems to pile up in there!! Now that the weather is warming it is the perfect time to clear it out and start fresh. AND, as you say, establish a system for clearing it out regularly.
Yep, best to clear out the car BEFORE it gets super warm and the car turns into a furnace!
You brought up such important points about the value of maintenance. If we attend to things are we go (putting back the pen in the pen pocket or regularly emptying the trash,) it keeps the environment in a ready-ness state. Doing a little bit at a time also makes ‘maintaining’ easier. But when we let things pile up and don’t attend on a regular basis, getting things back to square one takes longer and can be more stressful.
The key is knowing your comfort level for order and distress. Pair that with frequency, and you have a great formula that’s realistic for your life.
You got it, Linda!
Great tips!
One of the reasons I love my longtime ZÜCA business backpack is because it has so many specific zippered compartments so I can assign everything to a particular place, and there’s never any clutter. It makes it so easy to maintain. As for my car, I’ve had a rule since I got my first car in college, with the exception of umbrellas (and now, a phone charger), I keep nothing in the interior of the car. When I get out at the end of the day, everything comes with me. (The trunk/hatchback has safety and weather essentials, plus one file crate for work.) Just having a clear sense of what goes where, and never leaving anything behind or dumped is a sanity-saving system.
That’s a great way to do it, too! If you empty the car completely every time, clutter simply can’t build up!